I took it around 5-6 years ago when I was moving to Vancouver from the east coast. It was a great way to see the country and meet some other travellers - such a strange travel option attracts some interesting folks!
The highlight though is the Jasper-Vancouver leg going through the Rockies - if you don’t have 3 days to burn that’s a good choice. Rocky Mountaineer line goes through there as well iirc.
It's a big part of the country's history; the project was a key bargaining chip to get BC to join Canada. Development started with the first prime minister and the actual construction was incredibly expensive and filled with controversy over bribes and exploding construction costs, causing gov turnover and bringing the federal gov into significant financial risk a few times. But they did push onward to completion and it became the core pathway for the further settlement of western Canada, which was instrumental to the country's expansion. Nowadays it's primarily a freight railway, the passenger traffic is very minimal and tickets are very expensive; it's more of a tourism attraction than practical method of passenger transport.
That pretty much describes long distance North American rail generally. At least in the US, I'd add that it's not only slow but could be delayed by a day or more. I've occasionally toyed with the idea of taking one of those trains for at least part of their route but I have a feeling that it's one of those things where the idea >> the reality and it would get pretty old once the novelty wore off.
Later this year I'm going with a more luxurious version instead (ocean liner).
I took Via east to west a while back. It takes a few days, but just like Amtrak the regular seats are more spacious and comfortable than airplane seats so it's not too bad. No internet most of the way, so you better have some books or something to entertain yourself. The food is terrible because of course it is. Bring snacks. The train also stops for a couple hours in Winnipeg which has lots of places to get a good feed.
The scenery is pretty great, especially through northern Ontario where it feels like you are traveling through an alien planet where the only thing that exists are rocks, trees and eerie, pitch-black pools of liquid that you could imagine isn't water. You fall asleep at night then wake up the next morning and the view out the window is exactly the same. It's wild.
Crossing the Rockies isn't really worth it if you're only going for the views, imo. Lots of tourists get on the train at Jasper, but I imagine they'll be disappointed because the epic vistas are fleeting and most of the time your line of sight is blocked by trees, cliffs or tunnels. Unlike the route out of Denver on Amtrak, you don't get an awesome desert on the other side either.
Either way, the main point is that it's pretty much the only way to get from one side of Canada to the other if you don't want to use a plane or zig-zag through the US. Greyhound is gone, STC is gone, stringing together a bus route with a hodge podge of local operators is tough and in some places just leads you back up to Via anyway. If you're lucky enough to live along the CN line then Via is all there is, and it's better than nothing at all, which is the situation for a huge chunk of rural Canada.
I can comment on Caltrain only, the location is available via the 511.org API.
I built a project that predicts how late trains are based on their current location vs historical averages and posts the data to Mastodon. https://caltrain.live.
Very nice, thanks for the write up :). I was thinking about how you could get route maps, without actually having to source shape files. Given you are tracking trains every minute, you could probably build up your own route maps by dropping a point every time you get one, and connecting them with straight lines. Over time the route would become closer and closer to reality.
it already has something much more sophisticated - a high-speed air network
think your train is efficient? a plane can fly in a straight line between any two points in the US! beat that! ever see a train cross one of the great lakes? no challenge for a plane! rerouting a rail line can cost billions...but only a tiny bit of fuel to reroute a plane...not to mention I can go coast to coast in five hours on a plane but the world's fastest train would take much longer...
High speed rail is most competitive with short and medium range air. Say you want to go from SF to LA. That’s a 90 minute flight. Plus a few hours of getting to and from the airports plus faffing around within the airports. Or it’s a 6 hour drive. Or, with a top-quality high-speed line it’d be a little under two hours on the train, handily beating any current option.
High speed rail wouldn’t be all that competitive for going coast to coast in the US, definitely.
The train situation in the USofA is depressing on so many more levels than just speed. Availability is even worse. I'm in Dallas, but to get to Denver, I have to go to Chicago first and involves a >2 hour bus ride along the way. WTF?
Most of the states are too big to be economical. I think the biggest disappointment with US rail is that it doesn't get enough trucks off the highway. There should be no reason for trucks to venture more than a couple hundred miles from the nearest rail terminal. Not only is it wasteful, but it's more dangerous having trucks driving across the entire country.
Even in the densest areas of the country (NYC metro area), it's abysmal by developed world.
I got caught in probably the 2nd worst traffic driving to/from my parents (70mi away) this weekend I've had in 20 years. And yet it was still about 30min faster, each way, than if I took Metro North.
Speed would be nice, but speed is not the problem. If the trains just ran on time, 50mph would be just fine. The problem with Amtrak is frequent multiple-hour delays that stack up. The schedule is totally unpredictable.
High-speed rail typically excels when it can get you somewhere in a few hours because you wouldn't want to hop on a plane for that. At 50 mph, that gets you…basically nowhere. If you're doing 200 then you can cross most states in that time.
For me it's also cost. I have family in the Boston area and often traveling from NYC on Amtrak is at least as expensive -- and usually more expensive -- than flying.
But I'd also love if we could go faster than 50mph. TGV in France, which launched 41 years ago, travel between 167mph and 198mph [1].
"On time" is a metric that is focused on heavily, but to me it's meaningless. The LIRR is "on time" via schedule padding; a 50 mile trip to Ronkonkoma takes 80 minutes on the fastest express train. With line speeds largely 80mph throughout the route, commuters are robbed of an hour every single day. But hey, at least the "on time performance" metric is at 99%. Easy to do when your average speed is 37mph on 80mph track.
The LIRR Today has a great article, that I cannot for the life of me find, where the author used train speed data between stations to figure out what speed "most trains" accomplished (so accounting for curves, station stops, etc.) and redid the schedules according to that data. Without padding, everyone that uses the LIRR would save hours a week in commuting.
Incidentally, the LIRR has been moving away from higher train speeds and better connections to reduce travel time in favor of arriving at terminals within 6 minutes of the scheduled time. Schedule padding, replacing 80mph switches with 60mph switches (for the Elmont work), and removing all scheduled connections at Jamaica. I think it's crazy and I'm glad I don't commute to the city from Long Island. The connections at Jamaica disappearing is the most sad to me; that station has a really unique setup where 3 trains arrive at once, and you can transfer through the middle train to get to the other two destinations. It used to work like clockwork, but obviously if the middle train is late, the OTP for 3 trains decreases. Since that's the metric they care about, and not "can I get from any city terminal to any destination easily", that's what gets optimized out. I don't think it's good. It's nice if the trains run on time, but I'd rather be 20 minutes late once a week than spend an extra 5 hours on the train every week. But, not what the agency values.
HSR only makes economic sense in the northeast. Everywhere else is too spread out for rail to compete with air travel. The most popular air route in the western US (SF-LA) isn’t worth making high speed rail between. The project is expected to cost over $30 billion. Assuming 100% of air passengers use rail (4 million per year), at $150 per ticket it would take 50 years to break even… and that assumes zero maintenance costs. Also it would be slower than taking a plane.
Requiring freedom of movement to operate for profit is such a needlessly self imposed limit. This would be a solved problem if our government truly operated for the good of the people instead of for Continuity Of Government. The Department of Defense budget was 1.52 Trillion for FY2023 alone while we're arguing over an order of magnitude smaller: https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=...
Yeah, I'm going to add a disclaimer about this. I've been watching the GO trains from my window this morning and they lag about a minute behind. My site grabs data on a minute interval, and I know some of the API's say they purposefully add GPS lag.
I've made something similar in the past and my experience with the specific API was that it was surprisingly well considered but the actual data it returned was unreliable at best. Not just "slightly obfuscated for paranoid physical security reasons" but actually missing trains and reporting incorrect names.
Here in India we have an app named "Where is my train?". Local people use this app a lot when traveling by train. It's not government owned either and has no ads. Just throwing in here for some inspiration since I don't know the inner workings of that app.
Edit: It uses nearby cell towers to estimate the location of train
This feels like an internal app that somehow got a public URL. It has neat features like being able to make the same departure board they have in their stations, and it has a departure view that shows how many people are on the train: https://radar.mta.info/countdown/GCT
Wow, I don't know why I thought there would be... Way, way more trains active at a given time.
I suppose I overestimated passenger rail popularity in this country.. I knew it wasn't relatively huge, but there's several hundred miles in some cases between trains.
Coverage is actually surprisingly wide, just the service level is something out of the 1870s for a lot of stations. The siting for a lot of stations is usually pretty poor as well with terrible/nonexistent walkshed considerations (see the Palm Springs station, try walking to your hotel from that).
Fair enough, I was using "coverage" for actual trips, not nominal rail extent. "Service" is a better description. Your point about siting is very true.
Intercity passenger rail makes little sense over most of the USA, outside the existing northeast corridor.
In a sane world Amtrak would shut down most of the long-distance routes, fix the northeast corridor, and focus on gradually expanding that, but the politics of that are unattractive so it bumbles on with trains that only train nerds would ever consider actually riding on.
If you ride them most of the people don't seem like train nerds. Properly done rail would be viable for most of the US. A cross-country trip not really. But anything from about 800 to 1200 miles could be competitive with commercial flights and have extrinsic benefits as well. A 1200 mile flight takes about 3 hours. Add in a minimum of one hour on each end for airport transit and moving about within the airport and your at 5 hours, and often times much more. High speed rail moving 200 mph with 6 to 8 stops may take a couple more hours in the most advantageous to air comparison. Also consider than many of those 6 to 8 stops would be serving places that may require connecting flights or where people are driving to the major airport from.
It has the potential to be nicer, safer, cheaper and more environmentally conscious. There's no good reason America doesn't have top tier rail transit.
There are plenty of locations in the US where fast intercity regional rail could easily be useful and work. Florida, Portland - Vancouver, Alabama/Georgia/Carolinas/Virginias, Midwest.
Yeah, few people will take a cross-country train outside of for the novelty and the attraction itself (which are still not to be dismissed), but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of <4-5h trips that can be made via train if there was good, reliable and fast service.
The site is incomplete, and there are way, way more trains active at a given time. For instance the Tri-Rail and Brightline (high-speed rail) in Florida each have 5-6 trains running simultaneously. Brightline is notable as the US's first credible foray into high-speed rail. Similarly most major cities in the US have either light rail, rapid transit, or both, which is maybe not included in this map. "Passenger rail" might have some highly specific semantic meaning that leaves these out of this map.
Acela isn't HSR, and Metroliner which came before had travel times from NYC to DC as low as 2.5 hours. Acela does the same trip in 3.5 hours. Metroliner lowered trip times primarily through faster acceleration.
Acela is indeed fast for a short stretch. But the average speed is terrible, so it's only "HSR" on a technicality. It could be serious HSR if they had control and/or ownership of the entire route and made it as good as that short section where they can hit that peak speed.
Acela is like a Formula 1 car that gets to do one quick lap on a nice racetrack, then has to take another course through bumper-to-bumper traffic for the rest of the race.
You’re overstating it. The rest of the route is, except for a couple of areas around stations, a 125 limit, which is still basically double what Amtrak averages anywhere else.
Acela tops out at 150-160 mph (240 km/h-260 km/h) which is is above the 200 km/h bar for it to be considered HSR. Unfortunately, the route it runs on has several speed limits below even 100 km/h due to bridges and tunnels beyond the design life, so it's hard to call it HSR when it can't actually hit those advertised speeds.
Peak speed is how HSRs are defined, and Brightline is 200km/h, which is really mediocre for technology past the 80s, this is the speed at high most upgraded lines run in France.
I just rode it last week, and it actually took 3 hours, not 3.5.
Most of the NEC corridor from DC to NYC has a speed limit of 125mph; from NYC to New Haven, it's generally 70mph (!), from New Haven thence to about Kingston generally 90mph, and from there to Boston it's mostly 150mph. Given the density of the corridor, Amtrak should be trying for 150-220mph speed limits, but even 125mph is generally agreed upon to be the lowest end of HSR.
A surprisingly easy way to make the train go faster would be to redesign the switching sections before large stations to allow trains to go faster through them. You can probably cut around 10 minutes out of the entire length with an investment of less than $100 million just by doing that.
I read that post, and I have been working slowly on a set of jupyter notebooks, with ipyleaflet (mapping) integration to make building train maps (with max speeds) easier. Looking for colaborators
Could cut it probably but this isn't a private company we are talking about here. The regulations and grifting would be massive, especially in New York which is quite like California with their wastefulness: half to the garbage can, half to their pockets, maybe a cent or two for the actual rails.
So maybe it'd be a few billion at least. Not to say they shouldn't try. But I expect it'll be over budget and behind schedule, it would never happen like Brightline where they broke ground ASAP and just kept building until it was done.
I don't share your pessimism, and that's mostly because I've followed a lot more of the research into why US infrastructure costs are unreasonably high. To put it simply, excessive costs tends to come from a combination of overdesign (in particular the need to add lots of goodies to buy off stakeholders who can otherwise arrest the project), extra overhead in design costs, extra overhead in the way contracts are let, and incompetent management of contractors. But this is the sort of project that doesn't have the design stages to let that scope creep come in--it is pretty much "order off-the-shelf part number 42341 instead of 23421, then do routine maintenance tasks to replace old parts with new ones".
> “Given the density of the corridor, Amtrak should be trying for 150-220mph speed limits, but even 125mph is generally agreed upon to be the lowest end of HSR.”
In the UK and Europe, 125mph (~200 km/h) is considered the top speed limit of conventional rail. Legally, operating speeds beyond that require full in-cab signalling, positive train control, upgraded safety and structural requirements, and whatever else is required for HSR. Further, all the trains operating on a section of line need to be upgraded to those standards if any of them are to run at speeds > 125mph.
The UK does have some sections of conventional line that are capable of > 125 mph running, and even have done so in the past, but this is no longer allowed.
I’m not sure if the US has similar rules, but it wouldn’t surprise me if so!
> ”A surprisingly easy way to make the train go faster would be to redesign the switching sections…”
Yes, generally speaking, fixing the low-speed bottlenecks will typically yield the biggest benefits for the cost in terms of overall journey time.
No, it's like writing "Mexico and America". If you're going to add geographic qualifiers like "North", the equivalent would be more like "UK and West Europe".
Without such qualifiers, the meaning is clearly "continental Europe", which is a meaningful distinction when it comes to the rail, because they have two almost entirely disjoint rail systems.
Ok, yes, technically the European rail system does actually physically connect to the UK main lines at a few places on HS1 between London and the tunnel at Dover, but no public train uses such connections. Functionally, European and UK rail are essentially entirely separate in terms of operation, regulation and technology. Whereas on the Continent, trains regularly cross between countries and the whole system is much more-but far from entirely -integrated, politically and physically (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Rail_Traffic_Manageme...).
Uk does actually follow EU regulations and standards because all the technology is designed and manufactured in the EU. HS2 is being built to an EU standard loading gauge with EU standard electronic signalling, likewise crossrail. When routes are upgraded to electronic signalling they are upgraded to an EU standard signalling technology, likewise with electrification. Loading gauge is typically smaller but when new bridges are built they will try to aim for the largest EU standard loading gauge that’s practical. The reason why you can’t easily run a night train from Edinburgh to Paris is not technological it’s because the customs and border requirements necessitate an expensive building like an airport to house them. It’s not true that the EU rail system is homogeneous either, e.g Belgium, Germany and France all have electrified lines running at different voltages which can require bi or tri mode trains for through running.
> Whereas on the Continent, trains regularly cross between countries and the whole system is much more-but far from entirely -integrated, politically and physically
That's not true. There are some local connections and integrations, but outside of high speed rail which is generally built using the same standard, each country has their own load gauge, electrification standard, signalling system, etc. Cross-border trains are usually special traninsets built to multiple standards to be compatible.
There is progress on more integration and standartisation, and pretty much all new lines are built to the same standards, but the vast majority of rail is existing.
Not totally sure on this, just making an informed guess:
I think "passenger rail" implies passenger trains running on the "full/main" railroad lines that run all over the US. Something like light rail or local transit typically have their own discrete lines, in my experience.
Again, could be wrong, that's just how I interpret it.
Outside the northeast corridor and a few others, there are many Amtrak trains are only once a day, or less, and often with long routes. It's unfortunate. The network is pretty good in terms of coverage / states covered on the map (since it's optimized for that), but lots of places it's pretty much impractical to use because the one time/day doesn't work.
I really wish they could at least get to a minimum of two trains, a "day" and "night" train on every route. You'd think the marginal cost would be minimal considering all the track/stations are there anyway!
Isn't that mostly based on the fact that they share rail time? Its not like these tracks are unused in the other periods of time, they're just not Amtrak trains.
There used to be way way more lines forming more of a mesh than the skeleton we have today. Through a series of mega-mergers we are down to effectively a west-coast-duopoly and an east-coast-duopoly of companies that can run long-distance trains.
When railroad companies merge they tend to abandon one or the other's trackage in areas where the formerly-separate networks ran between the same market areas, keeping the minimum segments of track to cover the maximum number of customers (not even maximum geographical area).
Yep, I really like the train from Vancouver to Seattle but you get two trains each direction each day, one in the morning and one in the evening. Because of how long the trip takes it doesn’t really work as a day trip sadly - you’d be spending as long on the train as you would at your destination.
US population can be approximated as relatively dense populations in California, the Northeast, a central portion of Texas, and parts of the Midwest, with rural Europe-ish levels of density (with some greater pockets of density nestled within) in the rest of the country ~east of the Mississippi (and a lesser degree in the Pacific Northwest), and truly empty regions basically everywhere else.
In terms of where there should be lots of trains that there isn't, it's largely the Midwest outside of Chicago, Texas Triangle, and the Southeast, all of which could probably support hourly intercity HSR trains if they were competently built (although especially in the Southeast, this is going to be restricted basically to a single corridor).
What about Florida and the general Southeast? Memphis - Nashville - Birmingham Atlanta - Charlotte, going north to Virginia, and south to Florida definitely look like decently dense and urbanised to merit high speed rail between some of them.
This isn’t true, unless you’re doing something weird like booking the most expensive Acela the day before and comparing it to the least-expensive flight booked in advance. And even when you do this: taxi fare from NYC airports to downtown Manhattan is around $60, so I don’t know how you’ve worked this out.
It would be interesting to see a version of this for the UK, where there are approximately 24,000 train services operating every weekday. How well would it scale?
>If we're looking for some low hanging fruit around how to possibly lower CO2 emissions, well folks here it is.
I'm not really sure how you can call it "low hanging fruit" when its overall contribution to global emissions is only 2%, and how hard it is to build HSR projects in the US.
It's low hanging fruit in that everything involved is well understood with very seasoned technology and a deep amount of suppliers and engineering knowledge. As I said, we were doing this stuff in the 19th century, and have kept doing it (in some countries, just not NA).
This sort of solution doesn't require any sort of technological breakthroughs, or technologies that do not exist.
Trying to solve climate change based on working on new technologies that don't currently exist and may not ever exist seems harder to me, and yet remarkably we see people pointing to this approach instead of well understood solutions we already have.
Accordingly I'd call implementing proven technology relatively easy. One could get started on it tomorrow.
>It's low hanging fruit in that everything involved is well understood with very seasoned technology and a deep amount of suppliers and engineering knowledge.
>This sort of solution doesn't require any sort of technological breakthroughs, or technologies that do not exist.
You can say the same for solar panels and/or batteries? After all, they exist right now and can be mass produced. Moreover the electricity grid actually accounts for a significant chunk of global emissions, unlike aviation. The only thing really stopping them is cost, but then that's basically the same issue that HSR has, which is cost/delays/political issues.
>As I said, we were doing this stuff in the 19th century, and have kept doing it (in some countries, just not NA).
"[trains] in the 19th century" aren't a serious competitor to airplanes in the same way that ocean liners aren't a serious competitor to airplanes.
I'm not actually sure what the solution you're proposing is?
Even if you completely eliminated air travel (with no replacement - which is not realistic), you'd just reduce emissions by a mere 2%. Not a trivial number given the scale, but it's far from a "solution to our climate problem". (For comparison, the larger transportation sector including cars is is 16% of emissions. Cars alone are 12%.) [1]
It also turns out to be a very hard problem to solve. We don't have the tech to build an electric airliner yet, and given how hard it's been just to get a single high-speed rail line from SF to LA I'm not betting trains are going to be in a place to practically replace aviation in the US anytime in the next few decades.
Pretty much just proposing giving people some options. Right now they have few.
Right now in North America on an enormous amount of routes there's pretty much no real alternative to driving or flying and on many others where a train does exist it's so poor in quality that few use it.
If rail was a real option then more people would use it, and that would be transferring people from a relatively much higher CO2 emission form of transport to a lower emission one. That's a win.
Every where I look I see data that shows that the CO2 emissions per user are dramatically lower for train than air travel.
Now clearly on some big routes flying is a must and train would be so incredibly lengthly that it would be a misery, but there's tons and tons of shorter routes where train would work really well, competing well against car/bus and air travel.
If one wanted to get aggressive about it, once the infrastructure as in place, one could do what France has done and to ban short haul flights.
I believe there was a quote from a railroad exec that Passenger rail traffic accounts for only 3% of the overall rail traffic in North America. If true, the map would be covered with Locomotives if freight was included (GP-40's are my favorite).
That would be a curious comparison point. I feel like every discussion of rail in the US always turns into pointing and laughing at how bad the US is at rail because it's viewed through a passenger lens, completely ignoring how much rail is used for freight.
My impression is that a lot of the rest of the world has much better passenger rail, but uses freight rail quite a bit less. I wonder if part of it is due to the inverse reason to the US. Amtrak often complains that it gets sidelined (literally) because of freight usage of the same track. Is freight rail usage in, say, Germany, lower than the US because of the dominance of passenger rail?
I assume it would be less about the dominance of passanger displacing freight and more about scale/distance. Germany is smaller than Texas (half the area). How often is it economical to put stuff on trains before loading them on trucks again for distances sub 1000km?
Oh sure, but the "haha the US isn't even a third world country with its train system" people already are ignoring scale/density when they're laughing at the US rail systems. I'm past even bothering dealing with that bad faith take.
My curiosity is if the US has just traded off having better passenger rail for better freight rail, and if that's maybe a somewhat environmentally justified choice. How much more freight is going by truck in Europe because of the bias towards rail for passengers, and how does that compare to US people traveling by car when train would be better?
The usual metric is ton-kilometers of freight, not gross tonnage. Going by gross tonnage alone overweights the impact of last-kilometer freight, which is almost always by road.
Measured by ton-kilometers, the EU moves about 5% of freight by rail, whereas the US moves about 28% of freight by rail.
Intermodal (hauling shipping containers for trucks to take last-kilometer) is by far America’s biggest freight type. Something like 80% or more of consumer goods go through intermodal or road on their way to distribution centers that load it onto trucks that deliver it to the store (or your home).
For rail alone it looks like 50/50. 50% is resources and dry goods, oil and gas, and the rest is consumer goods, boxcar, flatcar, intermodal. [1]
> How much more freight is going by truck in Europe because of the bias towards rail for passengers, and how does that compare to US people traveling by car when train would be better?
Europe moved lots of freight by rail. But building of motorways shifted a lot of freight to roads. If your company moves just a few trucks of goods per week across Europe, road will be faster and cheaper.
Rail is now used mostly for bulk goods, but increasing conterisation is enabling easier use of rail even for smaller shipments (less than a full train length, which in Europe is max 700 m).
But the density in the US is not _that_ different. Sure if you take the average over the whole country or states like Texas or Arizona then you end up with numbers. But the north east of the US is comparably densely populated to Western Europe. And even parts of California/the west coast are similarly densely populated. Albeit with larger separations between population centers. Which, as a German, does not sound so bad, given that our high-speed rail has to stop every 30mins because the next city just isn’t that far away.
Really it is a (maybe unintentional) decision not to use trains for passenger rail.
On the other hand. The density of population (and thereby logistic) centers in Western and Central Europe makes freight trains much less useful. From Germany you can reach all of Europe in basically 2 days. And that’s already stretching what you’ll need to reach in practice. And then you add the expense of getting the load to a train station and away from it again and you basically never end up with an easy or obvious advantage for the rail system. What you see here quite often is that a single company/factory fills up a whole train (think car carrier or chemical transport). In these cases at least one end of the journey is typically directly linked to the rail system and the other end is probably a port. And that’s before you take into account that a useful expansion of the rail system requires coordination between multiple governments (there was/is a plan to link Rotterdam to Venice by high volume train connections. AFAIK this is still limited by a lack of expansion of a short part in northern Germany)
So yes. There is a bias towards passenger rail, both for operational (passenger rail is much faster to accelerate/decelerate) and political (passengers sometimes punish politicians for delays, freight doesn’t) reasons. But even without that. The geography and industrial makeup doesn’t produce the same kind of advantages as in the US. So it would still be used less
Americans passed on passenger rail due to more modern inventions like the automobile. Being able to “drive yourself” was the ultimate freedom. Trucking (and the interstate highway system) post WWII made it so trucks can get to every major city without hassle. This was because of the rail system being clogged up and some railroads failing (merger). People are starting to come back around to passenger rail service as more younger adults forgo the traditional driving right of passage. Sun rail in Florida for example. Metro subways. Etc. For longer distances, we have Frontier Airlines which is like the Greyhound Bus of the sky. Tickets are dirt cheap and you get what you pay for. Americans also designed their cities to be driven and not walked so we kinda went all in on “Ford” early.
It is actually a problem in Germany that high-speed trains too often share tracks with slower passenger and freight trains. Other countries like Japan put their high-speed trains on completely separate tracks.
Amtrak owns most (all?) of the NEC track between New York and Boston. Most other routes are freight train owned and Amtrak has issues. Though the freights claim the issue is Amtrak is late for their assigned times and once that happens they lose priority, if Amtrak was on time they claim that they would let Amtrak through on time. (one fright that doesn't let Amtrak through on time will cascade to being late for all transfers, so the freights can overall be right and still wrong just because of the one exception) I don't know how to evaluate this claim.
My understanding is that the freight trains now are really long, and there's few places to pull off the tracks for such long trains, so the timetables are really tight for when trains can pass each other.
This goes to what I was talking about in my initial post. Right now, part of why Amtrak is bad in the US is because we're getting pretty efficient use of the same rails for freight purposes. The ways around this would either be to somehow legally force freight to fully be lower priority than passenger, which presumably raises prices/lowers efficiency of freight on the rails or to build a mostly disjoint system of rails for passenger only.
The costs required to build a passenger only system is high and the density of the US makes me question if it would get the use needed to be viable. In the meantime then, is it net positive for the US to prioritize freight use over passenger? Even if we gave passenger traffic maximum priority, would it defer enough flights to offset the freight efficiency losses?
Passengers and freight have different constraints and so don't mix well on rail. We should build separate rail for each. Make them compatible rail but that is for emergencies you can mix not normal operations. (2am maintenance windows count as a good reason to mix)
Don't be fooled by population density, the western states and Alaska have a lot of nothing and bring the density down. You can find overlays of France and the Midwest that have similar populations. Overall there are lots of potentially great rail routes east of the Mississippi, and along the west coast. (But of course only if you invest in local transit, otherwise everyone may as well drive as they will need their car when they get there.
I'm not getting "fooled" by anything. I've spent most of my life in various parts of the Eastern US. The problem, to a big degree is that the parts of the US with the density for rail are both already big freight areas with major ports (LA, NYC, Baltimore, Boston, Savannah, Seattle) and have the good land already taken for freight rails, and also, because they're dense areas, are exceedingly difficult to find space to run new rails in that go to places people actually want to go.
We're past the era where we could just put a highway or rail line through the poorest neighborhood of minorities we can find, pay them all $10 for their land, and pretend it's a net good for the country. Without some truly insane government intervention that is both unlikely to happen, and probably shouldn't happen, I don't see how we'd add a full new rail system.
Amtrak pays $145m a year to freight rail companies like CSX and UP to use their rails for passengers. This was the bargain struck for allowing deregulation and privatization of rail in the US. They own the rails between NY and Boston but everywhere else, they have to pay the toll booth.
If you want to see the real Railways of North America, check out these interactive maps [1]
It's arguably the problem with any attempt at high speed rail in the US. Or even low-speed passenger rail. There's so much freight moving on the rails that there's just not much slack in the system for things not running on time.
As the parent says, the solution would be to add dedicated high-speed rails, but then you loop back to the US density issues. How fast would the Acela have to be for it to justify the price you'd have to charge to ever come close to paying back the cost to add a whole dedicated train line between Boston and Washington DC?
>How fast would the Acela have to be for it to justify the price you'd have to charge to ever come close to paying back the cost to add a whole dedicated train line between Boston and Washington DC?
No faster than it already is, I would think. The experience is SO much nicer than taking an airplane that a little extra time is worth it. Don't forget how much time is wasted in airplanes just getting to and from the airports and waiting for security checks and sitting on the tarmac waiting to taxi. Trains travel directly between city centers with almost no waiting time.
The Acela doesn't really need to be much faster, though it'd be nice; it just needs to be cheaper and more frequent.
I think Japan only does that for weird legacy reasons- freight and slower passenger trains run on 1067 mm gauge tracks, while the Shinkansen network is standard (1435 mm) gauge.
I don't think so. There's simply too much traffic on the shinkansen lines to be able to mix slower and/or freight trains on the same lines. On the Tokaido line between Tokyo and Osaka, trains run every 7 minutes (IIRC); you can't have a freight train sharing a track with a bullet train service that has trains that close together.
Was it an in-service passenger train? A freight train or out-of-service passenger train wouldn't show up.
Sadly, there's very little data available for most trains on US rails. For example, there's no way (AFAIK) to see what freight trains are active on the network. It's a little frustrating in comparison with how rich our air traffic sources are.
If anyone on HN knows of any richer sources for train network data, please let me know. I'm highly interested!
That seems believable - the UK saw 390 million passenger rail journeys in the last quarter [0]. Amtrak saw just under 23 million in all of FY22 [1]. That’s before accounting for the UK having a population around 1/5 that of the US.
It would be cool to see an equivalent map for freight rail.
These threads always focus on the lack of passenger rail service in the US but ignore that the US also has one of the largest, safest, and most efficient freight rail systems in the world[1]. I'd love to see it live!
It's quite hard to see those sadly due to how freight operators handle traffic - you often have to use word-of-mouth and FB groups to track them. I know there's a lot of railfans that have this data, but I'm not sure it's in a format one can actually use.
I did a bit of a deep dive on this over the weekend and left feeling more confused than when I started. From what I can gather, outside of CN's holiday freight train, most of the tracking is done by community members with SDR antennas and Raspberry Pis. They report to centralized servers (which I've yet to find), and the data indicates where trains are in signalling blocks. I'm the least knowledgeable person on trains, so I don't know if this is all accurate, but that's my best understanding.
I'd love to build some sort of service that takes this data, references a DB of signaling blocks, and establishes an estimated lat/lng - but that's a huge project of its own.
Ya, looks like it goes to a privately run server and the client that accesses the data requires membership. Seems like there should be something like Open ADSB (aircraft) but for trains. I might be interested in working on something like that too.
Define efficient. Profitable? Maybe. Good at moving an array of goods from anywhere in the country to anywhere else? Not so good.
The Class I's and their obsession with operating ratio and PSR have strangled freight in this country for decades and pushed costs onto the public by means of increased truck traffic (and the congestion, pollution, and roadway damage that entails). Unless you're shipping bulk chemicals or coal, you're probably gonna use a truck.
Busses would be soo much better if there was real time location of busses and trains that you could view on a map. Probably the lowest hanging fruit to pick for public transport improvement.
This is cool, but you are missing NJ Transit which has passenger trains separate from LIRR and Metro North. You are also missing Septa and MTA internal city light rail and subway lines, which are technically passenger trains.
There's also lots of track included that hasn't seen passenger trains in 30-50 years. The only passenger rail in Idaho is in the panhandle. I'm not sure if Helena has any passenger traffic either.
Yes, it is the Northern Indiana Commuter Train District. Inside Chicago, they run on Metra track. To avoid competition with Metra, they do not allow boarding on "inbound" trains inside of Illinois (except the Hegewisch station that is on the Illinois/Indiana border), and do not allow people to get off "outbound" trains until the Hegewisch station [1]
Funny thing, is that Chicago has direct rail access from downtown to 4 airports in 3 states - Chicago O'Hare and Chicago Midway via the CTA, Milwaukee Mitchell (via Amtrak), and South Bend Regional (via the South Shore).
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadCoincidence...??? I think not!
But it's pretty famous - we even have a song about it! [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Railroad_Trilogy
The highlight though is the Jasper-Vancouver leg going through the Rockies - if you don’t have 3 days to burn that’s a good choice. Rocky Mountaineer line goes through there as well iirc.
Later this year I'm going with a more luxurious version instead (ocean liner).
The scenery is pretty great, especially through northern Ontario where it feels like you are traveling through an alien planet where the only thing that exists are rocks, trees and eerie, pitch-black pools of liquid that you could imagine isn't water. You fall asleep at night then wake up the next morning and the view out the window is exactly the same. It's wild.
Crossing the Rockies isn't really worth it if you're only going for the views, imo. Lots of tourists get on the train at Jasper, but I imagine they'll be disappointed because the epic vistas are fleeting and most of the time your line of sight is blocked by trees, cliffs or tunnels. Unlike the route out of Denver on Amtrak, you don't get an awesome desert on the other side either.
Either way, the main point is that it's pretty much the only way to get from one side of Canada to the other if you don't want to use a plane or zig-zag through the US. Greyhound is gone, STC is gone, stringing together a bus route with a hodge podge of local operators is tough and in some places just leads you back up to Via anyway. If you're lucky enough to live along the CN line then Via is all there is, and it's better than nothing at all, which is the situation for a huge chunk of rural Canada.
I built a project that predicts how late trains are based on their current location vs historical averages and posts the data to Mastodon. https://caltrain.live.
I did a quick write up about it here: https://rydercalmdown.com/projects/trains-fyi/
The hardest part was learning about GTFS-RT, which was a data format I wasn't familiar with until now.
think your train is efficient? a plane can fly in a straight line between any two points in the US! beat that! ever see a train cross one of the great lakes? no challenge for a plane! rerouting a rail line can cost billions...but only a tiny bit of fuel to reroute a plane...not to mention I can go coast to coast in five hours on a plane but the world's fastest train would take much longer...
High speed rail wouldn’t be all that competitive for going coast to coast in the US, definitely.
I got caught in probably the 2nd worst traffic driving to/from my parents (70mi away) this weekend I've had in 20 years. And yet it was still about 30min faster, each way, than if I took Metro North.
But I'd also love if we could go faster than 50mph. TGV in France, which launched 41 years ago, travel between 167mph and 198mph [1].
[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV
The LIRR Today has a great article, that I cannot for the life of me find, where the author used train speed data between stations to figure out what speed "most trains" accomplished (so accounting for curves, station stops, etc.) and redid the schedules according to that data. Without padding, everyone that uses the LIRR would save hours a week in commuting.
Incidentally, the LIRR has been moving away from higher train speeds and better connections to reduce travel time in favor of arriving at terminals within 6 minutes of the scheduled time. Schedule padding, replacing 80mph switches with 60mph switches (for the Elmont work), and removing all scheduled connections at Jamaica. I think it's crazy and I'm glad I don't commute to the city from Long Island. The connections at Jamaica disappearing is the most sad to me; that station has a really unique setup where 3 trains arrive at once, and you can transfer through the middle train to get to the other two destinations. It used to work like clockwork, but obviously if the middle train is late, the OTP for 3 trains decreases. Since that's the metric they care about, and not "can I get from any city terminal to any destination easily", that's what gets optimized out. I don't think it's good. It's nice if the trains run on time, but I'd rather be 20 minutes late once a week than spend an extra 5 hours on the train every week. But, not what the agency values.
They already own most of the necessary land anyway: https://www.blm.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2023-07/BLM-Adm...
Edit: It uses nearby cell towers to estimate the location of train
This feels like an internal app that somehow got a public URL. It has neat features like being able to make the same departure board they have in their stations, and it has a departure view that shows how many people are on the train: https://radar.mta.info/countdown/GCT
I suppose I overestimated passenger rail popularity in this country.. I knew it wasn't relatively huge, but there's several hundred miles in some cases between trains.
you misspelled "union"
In a sane world Amtrak would shut down most of the long-distance routes, fix the northeast corridor, and focus on gradually expanding that, but the politics of that are unattractive so it bumbles on with trains that only train nerds would ever consider actually riding on.
It has the potential to be nicer, safer, cheaper and more environmentally conscious. There's no good reason America doesn't have top tier rail transit.
Yeah, few people will take a cross-country train outside of for the novelty and the attraction itself (which are still not to be dismissed), but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of <4-5h trips that can be made via train if there was good, reliable and fast service.
Edit: if you’re referring to Brightline West, construction hasn’t even started.
Acela is like a Formula 1 car that gets to do one quick lap on a nice racetrack, then has to take another course through bumper-to-bumper traffic for the rest of the race.
I just rode it last week, and it actually took 3 hours, not 3.5.
Most of the NEC corridor from DC to NYC has a speed limit of 125mph; from NYC to New Haven, it's generally 70mph (!), from New Haven thence to about Kingston generally 90mph, and from there to Boston it's mostly 150mph. Given the density of the corridor, Amtrak should be trying for 150-220mph speed limits, but even 125mph is generally agreed upon to be the lowest end of HSR.
A surprisingly easy way to make the train go faster would be to redesign the switching sections before large stations to allow trains to go faster through them. You can probably cut around 10 minutes out of the entire length with an investment of less than $100 million just by doing that.
https://github.com/paddymul/train-calculator
So maybe it'd be a few billion at least. Not to say they shouldn't try. But I expect it'll be over budget and behind schedule, it would never happen like Brightline where they broke ground ASAP and just kept building until it was done.
In the UK and Europe, 125mph (~200 km/h) is considered the top speed limit of conventional rail. Legally, operating speeds beyond that require full in-cab signalling, positive train control, upgraded safety and structural requirements, and whatever else is required for HSR. Further, all the trains operating on a section of line need to be upgraded to those standards if any of them are to run at speeds > 125mph.
The UK does have some sections of conventional line that are capable of > 125 mph running, and even have done so in the past, but this is no longer allowed.
I’m not sure if the US has similar rules, but it wouldn’t surprise me if so!
> ”A surprisingly easy way to make the train go faster would be to redesign the switching sections…”
Yes, generally speaking, fixing the low-speed bottlenecks will typically yield the biggest benefits for the cost in terms of overall journey time.
UK is part of Europe. It's like writing "In California and the USA", or "In Mexico and North America".
Without such qualifiers, the meaning is clearly "continental Europe", which is a meaningful distinction when it comes to the rail, because they have two almost entirely disjoint rail systems.
Ok, yes, technically the European rail system does actually physically connect to the UK main lines at a few places on HS1 between London and the tunnel at Dover, but no public train uses such connections. Functionally, European and UK rail are essentially entirely separate in terms of operation, regulation and technology. Whereas on the Continent, trains regularly cross between countries and the whole system is much more-but far from entirely -integrated, politically and physically (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Rail_Traffic_Manageme...).
Probably why I mentioned political integration in the sentence then.
But at this point I'm akchually-ing an akchually to an akchually!
That's not true. There are some local connections and integrations, but outside of high speed rail which is generally built using the same standard, each country has their own load gauge, electrification standard, signalling system, etc. Cross-border trains are usually special traninsets built to multiple standards to be compatible.
There is progress on more integration and standartisation, and pretty much all new lines are built to the same standards, but the vast majority of rail is existing.
(This doesn’t make the situation any less embarrassing.)
I think "passenger rail" implies passenger trains running on the "full/main" railroad lines that run all over the US. Something like light rail or local transit typically have their own discrete lines, in my experience.
Again, could be wrong, that's just how I interpret it.
I really wish they could at least get to a minimum of two trains, a "day" and "night" train on every route. You'd think the marginal cost would be minimal considering all the track/stations are there anyway!
When railroad companies merge they tend to abandon one or the other's trackage in areas where the formerly-separate networks ran between the same market areas, keeping the minimum segments of track to cover the maximum number of customers (not even maximum geographical area).
Check out the 2023 North American Abandoned Railroad Lines map: https://www.frrandp.com/p/the-map.html
In terms of where there should be lots of trains that there isn't, it's largely the Midwest outside of Chicago, Texas Triangle, and the Southeast, all of which could probably support hourly intercity HSR trains if they were competently built (although especially in the Southeast, this is going to be restricted basically to a single corridor).
I'm surprised anyone takes it at all.
US rail is starting at negative 100. Only a small group of masochists (raises hand) choose to inflict this on themselves.
The data is available and open!
https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1729195110888620057?s=20
If we're looking for some low hanging fruit around how to possibly lower CO2 emissions, well folks here it is.
The solutions to our climate problem have been staring us in the face since the 1900s.
I'm not really sure how you can call it "low hanging fruit" when its overall contribution to global emissions is only 2%, and how hard it is to build HSR projects in the US.
[1] https://www.iea.org/energy-system/transport/aviation
>In 2022 aviation accounted for 2% of global energy-related CO2 emissions
This sort of solution doesn't require any sort of technological breakthroughs, or technologies that do not exist.
Trying to solve climate change based on working on new technologies that don't currently exist and may not ever exist seems harder to me, and yet remarkably we see people pointing to this approach instead of well understood solutions we already have.
Accordingly I'd call implementing proven technology relatively easy. One could get started on it tomorrow.
>This sort of solution doesn't require any sort of technological breakthroughs, or technologies that do not exist.
You can say the same for solar panels and/or batteries? After all, they exist right now and can be mass produced. Moreover the electricity grid actually accounts for a significant chunk of global emissions, unlike aviation. The only thing really stopping them is cost, but then that's basically the same issue that HSR has, which is cost/delays/political issues.
>As I said, we were doing this stuff in the 19th century, and have kept doing it (in some countries, just not NA).
"[trains] in the 19th century" aren't a serious competitor to airplanes in the same way that ocean liners aren't a serious competitor to airplanes.
Even if you completely eliminated air travel (with no replacement - which is not realistic), you'd just reduce emissions by a mere 2%. Not a trivial number given the scale, but it's far from a "solution to our climate problem". (For comparison, the larger transportation sector including cars is is 16% of emissions. Cars alone are 12%.) [1]
It also turns out to be a very hard problem to solve. We don't have the tech to build an electric airliner yet, and given how hard it's been just to get a single high-speed rail line from SF to LA I'm not betting trains are going to be in a place to practically replace aviation in the US anytime in the next few decades.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
Right now in North America on an enormous amount of routes there's pretty much no real alternative to driving or flying and on many others where a train does exist it's so poor in quality that few use it.
If rail was a real option then more people would use it, and that would be transferring people from a relatively much higher CO2 emission form of transport to a lower emission one. That's a win.
Every where I look I see data that shows that the CO2 emissions per user are dramatically lower for train than air travel.
Now clearly on some big routes flying is a must and train would be so incredibly lengthly that it would be a misery, but there's tons and tons of shorter routes where train would work really well, competing well against car/bus and air travel.
If one wanted to get aggressive about it, once the infrastructure as in place, one could do what France has done and to ban short haul flights.
My impression is that a lot of the rest of the world has much better passenger rail, but uses freight rail quite a bit less. I wonder if part of it is due to the inverse reason to the US. Amtrak often complains that it gets sidelined (literally) because of freight usage of the same track. Is freight rail usage in, say, Germany, lower than the US because of the dominance of passenger rail?
Europe does have more favourable rivers, so some bulk goods (grain, coal, fuel, chemicals) are transported by barge. Other freight can go by sea.
My curiosity is if the US has just traded off having better passenger rail for better freight rail, and if that's maybe a somewhat environmentally justified choice. How much more freight is going by truck in Europe because of the bias towards rail for passengers, and how does that compare to US people traveling by car when train would be better?
https://www.trucking.org/economics-and-industry-data
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1068592/eu-road-freight-...
Measured by ton-kilometers, the EU moves about 5% of freight by rail, whereas the US moves about 28% of freight by rail.
For rail alone it looks like 50/50. 50% is resources and dry goods, oil and gas, and the rest is consumer goods, boxcar, flatcar, intermodal. [1]
[1] https://www.aar.org/topic/industries-we-support/#!
Europe moved lots of freight by rail. But building of motorways shifted a lot of freight to roads. If your company moves just a few trucks of goods per week across Europe, road will be faster and cheaper.
Rail is now used mostly for bulk goods, but increasing conterisation is enabling easier use of rail even for smaller shipments (less than a full train length, which in Europe is max 700 m).
Really it is a (maybe unintentional) decision not to use trains for passenger rail.
On the other hand. The density of population (and thereby logistic) centers in Western and Central Europe makes freight trains much less useful. From Germany you can reach all of Europe in basically 2 days. And that’s already stretching what you’ll need to reach in practice. And then you add the expense of getting the load to a train station and away from it again and you basically never end up with an easy or obvious advantage for the rail system. What you see here quite often is that a single company/factory fills up a whole train (think car carrier or chemical transport). In these cases at least one end of the journey is typically directly linked to the rail system and the other end is probably a port. And that’s before you take into account that a useful expansion of the rail system requires coordination between multiple governments (there was/is a plan to link Rotterdam to Venice by high volume train connections. AFAIK this is still limited by a lack of expansion of a short part in northern Germany)
So yes. There is a bias towards passenger rail, both for operational (passenger rail is much faster to accelerate/decelerate) and political (passengers sometimes punish politicians for delays, freight doesn’t) reasons. But even without that. The geography and industrial makeup doesn’t produce the same kind of advantages as in the US. So it would still be used less
This goes to what I was talking about in my initial post. Right now, part of why Amtrak is bad in the US is because we're getting pretty efficient use of the same rails for freight purposes. The ways around this would either be to somehow legally force freight to fully be lower priority than passenger, which presumably raises prices/lowers efficiency of freight on the rails or to build a mostly disjoint system of rails for passenger only.
The costs required to build a passenger only system is high and the density of the US makes me question if it would get the use needed to be viable. In the meantime then, is it net positive for the US to prioritize freight use over passenger? Even if we gave passenger traffic maximum priority, would it defer enough flights to offset the freight efficiency losses?
Don't be fooled by population density, the western states and Alaska have a lot of nothing and bring the density down. You can find overlays of France and the Midwest that have similar populations. Overall there are lots of potentially great rail routes east of the Mississippi, and along the west coast. (But of course only if you invest in local transit, otherwise everyone may as well drive as they will need their car when they get there.
We're past the era where we could just put a highway or rail line through the poorest neighborhood of minorities we can find, pay them all $10 for their land, and pretend it's a net good for the country. Without some truly insane government intervention that is both unlikely to happen, and probably shouldn't happen, I don't see how we'd add a full new rail system.
If you want to see the real Railways of North America, check out these interactive maps [1]
[1] https://www.acwr.com/economic-development/rail-maps
As the parent says, the solution would be to add dedicated high-speed rails, but then you loop back to the US density issues. How fast would the Acela have to be for it to justify the price you'd have to charge to ever come close to paying back the cost to add a whole dedicated train line between Boston and Washington DC?
No faster than it already is, I would think. The experience is SO much nicer than taking an airplane that a little extra time is worth it. Don't forget how much time is wasted in airplanes just getting to and from the airports and waiting for security checks and sitting on the tarmac waiting to taxi. Trains travel directly between city centers with almost no waiting time.
The Acela doesn't really need to be much faster, though it'd be nice; it just needs to be cheaper and more frequent.
I just drove by a train station, one train passed by, not on this map, haha
Sadly, there's very little data available for most trains on US rails. For example, there's no way (AFAIK) to see what freight trains are active on the network. It's a little frustrating in comparison with how rich our air traffic sources are.
If anyone on HN knows of any richer sources for train network data, please let me know. I'm highly interested!
I'll add them to the list and investigate; thanks!
[0] - https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/usage/passenger-rai...
[1] - https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
These threads always focus on the lack of passenger rail service in the US but ignore that the US also has one of the largest, safest, and most efficient freight rail systems in the world[1]. I'd love to see it live!
https://railroads.dot.gov/rail-network-development/freight-r...
https://atcsmon.software.informer.com/
https://www.rail.watch/rwmon.html
I'd love to build some sort of service that takes this data, references a DB of signaling blocks, and establishes an estimated lat/lng - but that's a huge project of its own.
The Class I's and their obsession with operating ratio and PSR have strangled freight in this country for decades and pushed costs onto the public by means of increased truck traffic (and the congestion, pollution, and roadway damage that entails). Unless you're shipping bulk chemicals or coal, you're probably gonna use a truck.
The CTA has this: https://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/wireless/html/eta.jsp?...
Those are the only two cities I've lived in, but the ability to track buses seems widespread to me.
[0] https://www.mbta.com/developers/v3-api/streaming
Southshore Line - connecting Chicago, IL (Millennium Station) to South Bend, IN, via East Chicago, Gary, Chesterton, etc
Funny thing, is that Chicago has direct rail access from downtown to 4 airports in 3 states - Chicago O'Hare and Chicago Midway via the CTA, Milwaukee Mitchell (via Amtrak), and South Bend Regional (via the South Shore).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Shore_Line